If you’re a pedestrian who has crossed with the “walk” light at a St. Paul intersection recently, there’s a good chance you’ve heard a chattering sound emanating from the “push button to cross” devices mounted to stoplight poles.

The devices are called Accessible Pedestrian Signals, or APS, and they’re designed to help blind and visually impaired people know when the walk light is on.

Earlier generations of the devices featured a bird song to indicate that the walk sign was on. But the recorded bird sounds were sometimes confused with actual birds, who according to some traffic experts, imitated the sounds of the signals.

More recent devices have used recorded voices that would say something like, “Broadway. Walk sign is on to cross Broadway,” when the light turns.

But studies comparing recorded voices and other audible signals, including chirps, cuckoos, clicks and a four-tone melody, found that the so-called “rapid tick” produced “the fastest and most accurate responses regarding which crosswalk has the ‘Walk” indication,” according to “Accessible Pedestrian Signals: A Guide to Best Practices,” produced in 2007 by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program.

The eight-tick-per-second noise, frequently described as sounding like a machine gun, has since been adopted in the latest federal and Minnesota manuals for traffic control devices.

That’s why St. Paul has been using rapid tick as it installs APS devices on crosswalks in effort to comply with the federal Americans with Disabilities Act.

Not everyone is happy about the new sound.

“My first reaction was the APS is broken,” Ken Rodgers said of the first time he heard the rapid tick on an APS near the state Capitol last summer.

Rodgers is blind and works as a disabilities program coordinator with the Minnesota Department of Transportation.

Speaking for himself and not for MnDOT, Rodgers said he prefers the APS devices that use a voice message to signal when it’s safe to cross.

He also criticized the rapid-tick devices because they don’t provide an audio count down on how many seconds are left before the light turns red, as the verbal devices do.

“It’s dangerous, and I think someone’s going to get injured relying on these changes,” Rodgers said.

While St. Paul and MnDOT uses rapid tick, Minneapolis is sticking with the verbal “walk” message on its APS devices, said Matt Lindstrom, a communication specialist with the city.

Lindstrom said the MnDOT manual mentions both rapid-tick and voice messages but does not recommend one method over the other.

Sweden, German, Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong use a rapid tick, said Janet Barlow, an accessibility expert. Canada uses a four-note signal called the “Canadian Melody.”

St. Paul’s devices offer voice messages in addition to the rapid click. If you hold down the button for longer than 2 seconds, a recorded voice will inform you what intersection you’re at by saying something like “Wait. Wait to cross University at Fairview. Wait.”

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